The Magical Power of Dictionaries

Alberto Mangue, director of National Library of Argentina, writes in his essay The Magical Power of Dictionaries published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "In the days of my youth, for those of us who liked to read, the dictionary was a magical object of mysterious powers."

He also writes about how libraries are like dictionaries. He notes, "Aby Warburg, the great reader, defined for us all what he called a library’s "law of the good neighbor." According to Warburg, the book with which one was familiar was not, in most cases, the book one needed. It was the unknown neighbor on the same shelf that contained the vital information. The same can be said of the words in a dictionary."